People LOVE "Awaken, My Love! " which is not a hip hop album, it’s R&B. “Redbone” is a huge hit off of that. It’s not exactly my cuppa but it’s not a bad place to go either. Give you another side of things. And “Because The Internet” is an obvious choice also.
Holy crap. I only just figured out that Childish Gambino is the same guy as Troy from Community. :smack: I’ve watched like every episode of that show and never connected the two. (I thought the name Donald Glover sounded familiar, but couldn’t place it.)
Oh, puly 
Post #42 probably makes more sense to you now, huh?
I find the video to be very interesting. But that song, I wouldn’t want to listen to it just as a song.
Yeah, I only actually listened to it last night. I watched it here the other day, but I don’t do sound when I am at work.
I think I actually liked it better without the sound. Not trying to be critical, and I get why they made many of the musical choices that they did, but it just wan’t something that I enjoyed listening to.
It’s actually fine as a song. The constant juxtapositioning of the two different musical themes is interesting and both are interesting and groovy. My biggest problem with the song as a song is that the song is better as presented in the video than the song all by itself. And no, Im not talking about the video at all here. I paid $1.29 for the song on iTunes but I’d erase it in a heartbeat if I could have the audio track from the video. The gunshot transitions are really vital to the song, and the long pause before the final movement sets up the conclusion well. Without them, there is no real tension or drama in the music itself.
The song didn’t do much for me after listening to it the first time. After watching the video for the fifth time, it is starting to grow on me.
I have a shitload of songs on my various playlists that I was only “meh” about after the first couple of listens. Like David Bowie’s “Cat People”. When I first heard that song, I wasn’t impressed. But then I watched that crazy-ass music video and I realized that for me, the song makes more sense as as a soundtrack than a stand-alone song. I don’t have Cat People on my Spotify playlist, but I do have it on my Youtube playlist. Doesn’t mean it’s not a fabulous song. It’s just that I really enjoy it more when I have visuals.
I’m finding it a bit funny and sad that there are some folks (not necessarily here, but elsewhere on the internet) who seem to think the song is an indictment of materialism and superficiality of contemporary hip hop (or black culture in general). I didn’t get that message at all. The name of the song is “This is America”. In America, all of us are about materialism and superficiality and putting on a happy face to please whomever has power over us. It makes sense for Gambino to use trap rap to portray this reality, given his ties to Atlanta and the popularity of the subgenre. But it isn’t just black youth who numb themselves to human depravity. We are all dancing in the midst of the human-caused death and chaos. Maybe it is human nature to block out that which you feel powerless to stop, but that doesn’t keep it from being grotesque.
So you feel that there’s no significance to the lyrics being “black man, black man: get your money”? No significance to the fact that there are no white children dancing?
I took those lyrics this way:
A profoundly unfair and unequal system means that individual black people are often forced to be extremely selfish – i.e. they can’t think about community, or sometimes even family, and the only chance they have to get ahead is to buckle down and hustle to “get that money” and not think about anyone else. So it wasn’t a criticism of hip-hop or black culture in general by any means, but a criticism of the American system. At least that’s the way I took it.
I watched this discussion about the track and the video today. The link is to Dead End Hip Hop which is one of my favorite hip hop related websites/YouTube channels. It’s a 30ish minute long conversation about not the just the track but the subsequent reaction to the track in media.
It’s really interesting.
Do you ever find white children dancing in rap videos?
Of course there’s significance. Black people are almost always disproportionate victims of everything in our society, and yet we are are also disproportionately represented in the entertainment industry. Black people protesting in the street are villified. Black people dancing on stage are praised. It’s a fucked-up dichotomy that has been with us since the country’s founding.
But this isn’t an indictment against black culture or hip-hop. It’s an indictment against the society that reflexively vilifies angry and frustrated black victims while praising the black entertainers that feed us the stereotypes that society hungers for.
It’s an indictment against an society that allows the angry and frustrated victims of gun violence to be publicly humiliated while electing those who speak reverently about guns to positions of power, since they too feed us the stereotypes that society hungers for.
The song doesn’t paint a grotesque picture of hip hop. It paints a grotesque picture of America. IMHO. It ain’t just hip hop kids watching on the sidelines through their cellphone cameras (or flinging themselves off railings while no one notices). It’s all American kids.
President Obama was vilified for being a community activist who sometimes talked about race. When he mentioned his physical resemblance to Trayvon Martin in an effort to show compassion towards the boy and his family, you woulda thought he’d just announced his allegiance to the Nation of Islam, the way conservatives carried on.
But President Trump jokes about shooting someone on 5th Avenue, in this era of mass shootings, and everyone is supposed to laugh.
It’s better to make people laugh than to make them feel compassion, you see.
Yes, why it didn’t connect when I read it, I don’t know. I swear, I actually do try to keep on top of pop culture and am not one of those people who take pride in having no idea what is going on in that universe.
Yes, but not in this video. We’re talking about this video, not other videos, right?
I agree with what you say but differ on whether or not there’s an indictment of black culture or hip hop. BC/HH is a part of American society that directly and forcefully impacts black people in America, and his deliberate avoidance of, or de-glamorizing of, the trappings of hip hop culture in this video is significant, IMO.
I don’t think he’s saying it’s the worst thing in the world, but I do think the video is making the comment that in no way are the fantasies expressed in hip hop culture either a reflection of reality or helpful to creating the world many of us wish we lived in.
I agree that he points out the fantasies that are often portrayed in hip hop music videos. But these are the same fantasies we see all over popular artforms. They just aren’t always expressed with the street slang of the Dirty Dirty and booty-shaking backup dancers.
I personally can’t think of any popular music genre that’s not selling fantasy to the distraction of reality, so that’s why it strikes me as unfair for people to think he’s just lambasting trap rap, hip hop, or black culture in general. Like, are country music artists telling people to wake up to the problems infecting rural America (addiction, mental illness, gun violence, etc.)? Is there a contemporary country song with a message like the Root’s “It Ain’t Fair”? I’m not a consumer of this genre, so I wouldn’t know. Also, I wouldn’t expect trap rappers to provide any deeper social commentary in their art than, say, house music artists. Some musical forms are intended to be all about the ass-shaking, and I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. However, hip hop has always had a social consciousness, so it does bug me that people seem to think it’s all hoes and bling.
I don’t know if Glover Gambino is someone who thinks black artists have a greater responsibility to be ultra moralistic in their artforms than other artists. I hope not though I can understand that POV. But even if he is, I don’t think he was wagging a finger at just black people. Not in a song called “This is America”.
This is also how I interpret it.
I agree completely and am unsure what I wrote that would give the impression that I thought he was “wagging a finger at just black people.”
I didn’t say you said this. But I have stumbled across comments in other forums that seem to be suggesting this.
The fantasies that hip hop sells are not ubiquitous. There is no analogue in heavy metal for the guns-bitches-money that is so prominent in hip hop.
In any case, tho, that hardly matters since we’re talking about this Childish Gambino video. Right?